There are many establishments, both military and civilian, which have various types of vehicles, machinery, systems, or the like, which require periodic maintenance. By way of example, in the field of military aviation, an establishment may have many different types of aircraft, each with perhaps more than 100 different types of maintenance service requirements. Each such maintenance service requirement necessitates its own unique set of maintenance tools.
In addition, space limitations often necessitate the use of compact toolboxes containing only the necessary tools required for each specific maintenance operation. As an example, on board an aircraft carrier, many different types of aircraft must be serviced for several months while at sea. All of the tools and parts necessary for servicing aircraft on deployment must be readily available on the aircraft carrier. In order to obviate the requirement of transporting a multitude of various tools to a maintenance worksite, each of the maintenance service requirements has a designated toolbox containing only the particular tools necessary to perform the required maintenance task (including repairs) on the aircraft.
A tool management program in current use for aircraft provides for tool accountability, eliminates aircraft accidents and incidents and associated equipment damage due to lost, misplaced or broken tools. Each tool has an assigned location within the toolbox to help keep track of all the tools within the toolbox and to quickly identify any missing tools.
As part of a tool management program, a document, or manual is created for each aircraft upon which various maintenance tasks are to be performed. This manual contains explanatory text as well as outline drawings of the various tools positioned within respective panels of a toolbox. In addition, the manual contains an itemized listing of such tools for each panel, and a total listing summarizing all tools used on the entire maintenance program for the aircraft.
The creation and any subsequent modification of these manuals is extremely costly and time consuming, particularly in the graphics portion depicting tool-filled panels and in the presentation of data associated with the tools. If a particular task changes, necessitating an addition or deletion of one or more tools to the toolbox, not only must new tool-filled panels be drawn and substituted for the old ones, but the itemized listing must be appropriately changed as well as the total listing summarizing all of the tools used on the entire maintenance program for the aircraft.
The system of the present invention is instrumental in designing such customized toolboxes for specific maintenance tasks, and is capable of rapidly and easily modifying the manual to accommodate for any tool changes in the program.
It will be appreciated that although reference is made herein to aircraft on board an aircraft carrier, the invention is equally applicable to other environments such as commercial airlines, the automotive industry and any manufacturing industry that requires control and accountability of tools, including parts, inventory items, etc,
A computer-based system is provided for creating and modifying a tool management document. The document is comprised of various portions, including graphics portions and data portions, with the graphics portions representing tools positioned within panels of toolboxes used in a comprehensive maintenance program.
The computer has a word processing module-, a graphics module-and a data interface arrangement linking the word processing module-and graphics module. The graphics module has stored tool representations and stored panel representations whereby a user may select certain tools to be graphically placed within certain panels to create a tool-filled panel. This tool-filled panel representation may be placed directly into the graphic portion of the document.
The tool and panel representations have certain attributes defined by associated data. The data interface arrangement, which is comprised of a interface module and sort module, is operable to extract data, defining the attributes, from the graphics module and to sort and place only selected data into the data portion of the document.